He's making the rounds and I just got around to watching his Charlie Rose interview on Hulu.
"I was wrong. I thought I was writing about the end of an era and what I was writing about was the beginning of an era. It really was the start of what we are, what I think we have arrived at now. There were changes that took place on Wall Street then that we're seeing the milan (?) consequences of now like firms ceasing to be partnerships and becoming public corporations. No Wall Street firm that was a partnership would have ended up owning $50B of CDOS backed by subprime mortgages. They took risks on Wall Street that they would have never taken with their own money."
What's the difference between partnerships and corporations?
Limited Liability.
Lewis seems to blame the absence of Glass-Steagal for the extremes of Wall Street. Despite his words, he never seems to focus on whether reforms addressing the evolution of investment banks from partnerships to corporations as the primary cause of the crisis. In other words, he never gets around to the limited liability problem.
The thing about Charlie Rose, the show is one of the most intelligent on television, but occasionally Rose asks a question that is so simplistic. For instance, his questions that focused on the role of rating agencies or the ineffectiveness of regulation. Generally, he does a good job staying neutral but during those occasional questions, it seems as if his ideology is leaking out.
Perhaps, he is doing that purposefully.